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Epilogue: Starlifter In 1958 William Tunner suffered a heart attack. By then he was thick in battle to save MATS, and later wrote an acquaintance, “to be perfectly frank, it has been a very tough year for me.” Tunner wanted to retire as soon as possible for health reasons, but MATS was moving from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, and the Pentagon asked him to oversee the transition. By the end of the Rivers hearings a date had been set for him to step down, and the congressman paid Tunner homage by publicly asking the general’s pardon as he got “just a little bit nostalgic.” Mendel Rivers acknowledged that “it hasn’t been easy in recent years to carry the banner of MATS,” butTunner had done the same fine job he had for years. Looking back over the Hump operations, Berlin, and Korea, Rivers acknowledged, “We owe a great deal of the success to your leadership, and your everlasting and untiring endeavors.” In the end, he summed up the obvious, “If anybody in America today has justly earned the title of ‘Mr. Airlift,’ that would be you.”1 WilliamTunner retired from the United States Air Force, the service that he had dedicated his life to, but which had also resisted his visionary ways and entrepreneurial personality, on May 31, 1960. He had served as head of MATS, the post so rightfully his, for less than two years, although his impact was, of course, infinitely greater. At the ceremony celebrating his departure, Chief of Staff General Thomas White awarded Tunner the Distinguished Service Medal, the service’s highest peacetime honor; the citation read, “by his skillful and forceful leadership and exceptional ability,” Tunner had been “eminently successful in welding the various services of the Military Air Transport Ser- Epilogue / 247 vice into a cohesive and outstandingly effective organization.” During the subsequent parade, among the dignitaries who were permitted to join the official party in the reviewing stand was Congressman Mendel Rivers of South Carolina . West Germany later made Tunner a Knight Commander of the Order of Merit, and named a street after him in the city he had saved—Berlin—to honor his name and memory.2 In some ways it was fortuitous timing. With a new administration, a new attitude toward airlift, and money flowing, the time for bureaucratic infighting was over; MATS needed a soothing administrator, not a devoted advocate. There was still built-up resentment in the air force against someone who had, in pursuit of ideals, sided with Congress and the army against their own ranks. As one scholar put it, “What MATS needed was a commander with a good understanding of airlift, wide respect and trust within the Air Force community , and the ability to maintain the progressive alliance.” In the end, Tunner’s ideas would triumph, but the military had had a hard time with someone who acted more like the creator of giant industrial complexes than an anonymous square in an organizational flow chart.3 The likelihood that Tunner would remain idle was nil. When a new Berlin crisis broke out in 1961, the world wondered if the city could once again be saved if blockade reappeared. Life naturally interviewed the man they referred to as “the world’s most successful operator of airlifts,” who told them that of course the United States could duplicate the effort, but it would work even better now, because larger planes were available, then offered details of how many planes, flights, and airports would be needed this time around.4 The grand themes of his life continued to dominate, and Tunner now had more time to write about them. In “Strategic Airlift,” an article that came out in early 1961, he pushed for supersonic transports and a larger role for MATS. Four years later, in “Do We Want a SupersonicTransport Or an $89Trip to Europe ?” he argued against a Mach 3 transport in favor of a jumbo jet that could haul vast quantities of passengers or cargo for both the civilian airlines and the military. In familiar language, he observed that a plane like that could start “a revolution.”5 His biggest literary project, however, was an autobiography.This was a frustrating project; Tunner had to work with a ghost writer, and the first wordsmith to take on that task turned in a glib, facetious chapter and had to be dropped. Although a second choice turned out to be...

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